My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say anything to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buying anything here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try anything on (I think she might go back without me; and I will confess to her now I was wearing something I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was persuaded so well by her arguments against reading Bangladeshi working women as cultural dopes, stepping blindly into exploitative paid work whilst carrying the burden of housework and facing down challenges to their reputations as good women. Kabeer’s incorporation of how culture is “woven into the content of desire itself” (2000: 328) is persuasive. Women chose paid work outside the home and still counted as good, they liked working in a clean place for good wages far more than labouring in a field, and took pleasure in contributing to meeting their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the garment workers agency and voice. They are not an innately malleable, grateful, reserve army of nimble fingered knitters; they are not victims of a disorganized capitalism where feminism and neoliberalism combine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the normalisation of the dual income family working for low wages in insecure employment marks a failure of feminism, for (without realising it) privileging choice no matter what.

When War on Want describe sickening factory conditions and I read of these injuries and deaths, this is damage, and Fraser’s is the line that persuades me. As I don’t want my consumption practices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because political pressure on H&M makes them choose a new subcontractor (one less famous for its working conditions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleeding, liberal, western heart. This is damage too. I’m not adding much to an unanswerable debate other than easing my own conscience by playing out the tensions: strong conclusions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

References

1. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56.
2. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.

However, I’ve never met an economist with a reasonable explanation for human behaviour. Alcock suggests that working hours are subject to an income effect and a substitution effect (either an increase in your hourly pay makes you work more hours because you get more back, or the same increase makes you cut hours because you can maintain your standard of living with less effort). Implicit in this is the naive assumption that people choose their working hours.

The waiters, shelf-fillers and road-sweepers whose wages are falling, are working in organisations that don’t permit them to choose hours. They’re likely to work for companies which strictly control overtime, possibly working where flexibilised working time is imposed, and they may be on a zero hours contract with no say over when and how long they work for. Purcell et al (1999) found that manual and lower skilled workers were less able to control their working hours, and benefited less from flexibilisation. The economists mantra of choice gets in the way of understanding labour market experiences.

References

1. Purcell, K, Hogarth, T. and Simm, C (1999) ‘The costs and benefits of ‘non-standard’ employment’. Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Nonsense. It’s work. And the centrality of work, however conceived, to identity is never more clearly revealed when the chance to do it is removed. When business closures or downsizing mean job losses. When Woolworths can’t outlast an economic downturn so women with 20 years of experience lose their purpose (Panorama, BBC, 13th April 2009). Even when inflected with other identity-anxieties (of nationality, as in the Immingham dispute; of gender in arguments over family breadwinner status), it is work.

And there will be more of this. I remember one thing that made sense in A level economics class: hysteresis. Named by economists (see Layard, Nickell and Jackman, 1991), but needing a sociological vision to explain it, refers to a short term rise in unemployment which then sticks. The unemployed find it increasingly hard to get back into work. The longer unemployment lasts, the more likely it is to last a long time. And this is not because unemployment produces fecklessness and a desire to sit around on those generous benefits, as the discourse of benefit-dependency suggests . It is because of the social and psychological impact of joblessness in a world where work matters, and where work identity matters. It is because of losing connection to the world outside home other than in mediated ways. It is because, regardless of fault, when hard work is a virtue not working means a lack of virtue. And it is also about a loss of skills. But to only refer to skill is to miss out the central significance – unemployment is felt and lived with, it is more than a status.

Bibliography

1. Bauman, Z (2005) Work, consumerism and the new poor. 2nd Ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
2. Layard, R., Nickell, S. and Jackman, R. (1991) Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Ransome, P. (2005) Work, consumption and culture: affluence and social change in the twenty-first century. London: Sage Publications.